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Bioengineer follows dreams started at DHS

DEMING – Sharlene Flesher had never heard of bio-engineering when she walked during the Deming High School Class of 2007 Commencement Exerc to begin a career that would have her picking the brain and bridging the gap between engineering and medicine

Deming High grad published in medical journal for work in bio-engineering

DEMING – Sharlene Flesher had never heard of bio-engineering when she walked during the Deming High School Class of 2007 commencement exercise. Now she's headed down a career path that bridges the gap between engineering and medicine.

Flesher began her journey in Deming as a three-sport Lady Cat athlete and member of several extracurricular science clubs at DHS. She helped guide the 2005 Lady Wildcat volleyball team to a 21-4 record and a second consecutive state championship.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, she began working toward her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, where the brain has been at the forefront of her mind.

Flesher was recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant for her research on a brain-computer interface that will allow patients with spinal cord injuries and prosthetics to gain feeling in their prosthetic limbs. Flesher has dedicated the past five years to research and work on the project and has made strides with two human patients during her work. The findings and work of the team was published in October in Science Translational Medicine journal. Flesher says the work has become second nature to her.

“Once you start training, you can’t turn that mode of your brain off,” said Flesher. “Computers are complicated but you can make them simple with ones and zeros, so I thought, brains are the same thing — they’re complicated. Let’s see if we can pack it down to zeros.”

Flesher and her colleagues are working with sensory nerves in the brain and trying to bring sensation back to fingers or hands in patients who have lost limbs in order to grab and feel objects again. She says that research on humans is crucial because people can articulate how they are feeling and what the sensation means to them. After building her work around monkeys, she has been testing her findings on people and making real-world applications with her findings.

While in high school, Flesher was mainly focused on sports and robotics. It was in college where she found medical applications to robotics and began pursuing her career to connect the fields. After being published and receiving national recognition, Flesher serves as a role model to the students currently walking the halls of DHS.

“Figure out what you’re interested in and there’s somebody who’s going to pay you to do it,” said Flesher. “If you see a problem you need to address, just poke around, ask somebody and eventually you’ll get the answer.”

Flesher credits her family and education in Deming with her ability to enter the field of bio-engineering, and encourages others to venture out of the town and find their niche in the world.